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Jessie regretted her earlier patience.

It was taking longer than expected to get Olivia Townsend to Central Station. Apparently, she’d had a meltdown at the doggy daycare center, and the EMTs were called. The officer with her took her to the hospital as a precaution. Jessie was mildly suspicious about the meltdown, and considered meeting Townsend there, but ultimately chose not to.

She was told the woman would be on her way here soon and requested that she be taken to an interrogation room upon her arrival. Then, she turned her attention to the task in front of them. They had a lot to go over in the interim.

In the two hours that they waited for the dog walker’s arrival, they focused on what they could accomplish. Rather than work in the crowded bullpen area of the station, where detectives for every other unit had desks, they convened in HSS’s small, dedicated research department, where Jamil and Beth were headquartered.

While the researchers sat at their desk, both of which were littered with monitors, Jessie and Susannah sat on the ratty loveseat pressed against the far wall, flipping through printouts on all of the Hartley’s regular contacts, which Jamil had prepared for them before they arrived at the station. That was nothing unusual for him.

Jamil Winslow was a short, skinny twenty-five-year-old with thick glasses and no sense of fashion style. He was also a genius, capable of filtering through massive databases, sorting surveillance video into manageable buckets, or making complex financial records understandable, all seemingly in the blink of an eye. His social skills didn’t always match his intellectual ones, which is where his sole employee came in.

Beth hadn’t prepared packets for them, but she did have hot coffees waiting. In that way, she was Jamil’s opposite. He was all about the stats, less about the people. Beth was more intuitive, able to piece together how personalities fit into those stats. It’s how she sensed that Jessie and Susannah could use caffeine hits when they arrived.

But the young woman wasn’t just touchy-feely. While not a human supercomputer like him, she had an incredibly sharp mind, which people tended to underestimate because she was an attractive, six-foot-plus former college volleyball star.

Right now they were both staring hard at their screens, evaluating the data they already had. Jamil had used a computer program that he’d developed to quickly cull through all of the Hartley’s contacts and come up with the ones that they interacted with the most. That was the list Jamil had printed out.

While Jessie and Susannah reviewed it, he was poring over every name, even ones the couple had only had tangential contact with, to search for folks with criminal records. He’d also set a separate system to create a digital map of the couple’s recent movements, using the GPS data from their phones and vehicles. It would be complete in a few hours.

In the meantime, Beth had reviewed the Ring camera footage from last night and several days prior, looking for any suspicious activity. There was nothing, though, that wasn’t a shock. The killer could have easily avoided detection by walking along the edge of the large yard, staying out of visual range of the camera as they reached the side fence.

“The house did have a conventional security system,” she told them, “but according to the company, some of the cameras were damaged in that huge storm last month. Apparently that screwed up their whole system, which was old anyway, so the company came out and removed it. They were scheduled to install the upgraded version this upcoming Thursday—four days from now.”

“That’s quite a coincidence,” Susannah noted skeptically. “I don’t think it would hurt to check the employee list from the company. Let’s find out if anyone on their staff has a record.”

“Already on it,” Beth said. “So far, nothing, but it’s a big company. They have 42 field technicians, so I’ll keep looking.”

“Excellent,” Jessie said before addressing a consistent theme she’d noticed in the hours that they’d been reaching out to contacts of the Hartleys. “You know, I’ve made nine calls to friends and former colleagues so far. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had anyone say a bad word about them yet, and that’s without knowing the couple is dead.”

“Same thing,” Susannah agreed. “And it doesn’t sound like these folks are spouting the official line. They all sound genuine when they talk about their affection for the Hartleys. I get that they may have been nice people, but no one’s that nice. Everyone has secrets.”

“Are you sure you’re not just projecting?” Jessie wondered.

The detective looked about to offer a comeback when a young female uniformed officer with brown hair and alert eyes knocked on the open door. They all looked up.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said cautiously, “but I’m Kaley Doyle. I was assigned to take Olivia Townsend to doggy daycare and then to the hospital. I just put her in one of the interrogation rooms. Thought you should know.”

“How’s she doing?” Susannah asked.

“Better now,” Officer Doyle said.

“Do you think her meltdown was legitimate?” Jessie asked, not pulling punches.

“I’m no expert,” the young woman conceded, “but she was convincing to me. She kept saying how the dogs had to be taken to a safe space, that they sensed something was wrong, but that once they were around other dogs, they’d forget about their anxiety. Once she dropped them off, she kind of lost it.”

“Maybe she had the opposite reaction as the dogs,” Jessie ventured, trying to give Townsend the benefit of the doubt. “It could be that she focused so intently on getting the dogs to a place of comfort, and once that task was complete, her brain couldn’t avoid the memory of what she’d seen on that bed. If it all came tumbling back into her head at once, that could be overwhelming.”

“That’s how it felt to me,” Officer Doyle agreed, “but you guys should be the judge. She’s waiting for you now.”

Jessie and Susannah left Jamil and Beth in the research room as they followed the officer down the hall to interrogation room one. They all stopped outside the door.

“Anything else we should know before we go in?” Susannah asked.

“Just that she’s scared,” Doyle said. “Just being in a police station has her freaked out and putting her in an interrogation room rather than a meeting room has her even more agitated.”

“That’s what we wanted,” Jessie said, satisfied. “Good work.”

Officer Doyle nodded and led them inside, where they found a petite woman in her thirties sitting in a metal chair bolted to the floor. Her hands were resting on a metal table, also firmly attached to the floor.

She had frizzy red hair, pale skin, and more freckles than Jessie could count. She wore a gray long-sleeved shirt, pants, and a sunhat, which dangled behind her, connected by a string at her neck.

“Ms. Townsend,” Officer Doyle said, “this is Detective Valentine and Ms. Hunt. They’re handling the case from here on in and they have some questions for you.”

“Are you staying?” the woman asked in a quavery voice.

Doyle looked at them hesitantly. Jessie shook her head as Susannah answered.

“I’m afraid Officer Doyle has other responsibilities,” she said. “We’ll take it from here.”

She sat down in one of the chairs across the table from Townsend, and Jessie took the other. Once they were settled, she continued.

“Ms. Townsend,” Susannah said firmly, “we’ve had a chance to read the statement you gave the officers at the scene but there are several questions we want to follow up on.”

“Okay,” Townsend said nervously.

“How do you know the Hartleys?” Jessie asked.

“I’m their dog walker,” she explained apprehensively, “which I guess you know. Also, I live in the neighborhood, and we were already acquaintances.”

Jessie and Susannah exchanged a look, and Jessie knew they were thinking the same thing. She nodded that the detective should take the lead with their shared question.

“No offense,” Susannah began, “but you live in the same part of Hancock Park as the Hartleys and you work as a dog walker?”

“No offense taken,” Townsend said, looking comfortable for the first time. She must have fielded this question often. “I’m recently widowed. My husband died about eighteen months ago, and he left me a sizable nest egg, which was nice. But I was also incredibly lonely, so I took up walking local dogs. It kept me busy during a tough time, and now I really love it.”

“But you knew the Hartleys before you became their dog walker?” Jessie confirmed.

“A little, yes,’ Townsend said. “We traveled in some of the same circles. But after Carl died, they reached out to me. They’d heard what I was doing and offered to let me walk Laurel and Hardy—those are their dogs. It was more of a gesture of kindness than anything. They like to walk them but sacrificed a little of their own pup time to help me out. I’d often do the late afternoon walk. And after I brought the dogs back, they’d sometimes invite me in to hang out, maybe have a drink.”

“So they were home most of the time?” Jessie asked.

“Yes,” Townsend said. “Obviously, they’d attend events and the like, usually in the evenings. Cynthia was very active with several charities. But other than obligatory stuff and some travel, they were mostly homebodies.”

“Is that where they were last night?” Susannah wondered, “when they told you they were staying up late and planned to sleep in today?”

“They weren’t specific about what they were doing, just that it would be a late night,” she said, “which is why they asked me to do the morning walk.”

“And you went to check on them because of the dogs’ accidents?” Jessie pressed.

Townsend nodded, cringing at the memory.

“Yes,” she said earnestly. “You have to understand that they were super-devoted to Laurel and Hardy. They didn’t have children and viewed the dogs as their babies. So when I found that the pups had made messes in the mud room, I knew something was wrong. Cindy and Richard would never just leave them cooped up like that to fend for themselves for so long.”

“And that’s when you checked on them?” Jessie wanted to know.

“I called out to them multiple times from down the hall, but they didn’t answer,” she said. “I know it seems presumptuous, but after shouting out four or five times, I decided to go back and see if they were okay. It felt irresponsible not to.”

“And you found them posed like that?” Susannah asked.

“It was horrifying,” Townsend said with a shiver.

“Did you recognize the masks they were wearing?” Jessie asked.

“No, but truthfully, I didn’t look that carefully at them. Once I got close enough to see that they were dead, I turned and ran out of there so fast that I almost tripped. I called 911, then collected the dogs and waited out in the front yard until the police arrived.”

Susannah was quiet. Jessie knew her next question was a long shot, but she had to ask anyway.

“Do you know if either of the Hartleys had any enemies?”

Townsend shook her head, making her frizzy red hair bounce.

“We didn’t have the kind of friendship where they’d tell me stuff like that, but it’s hard to imagine that they did,” she said. “I don’t know much about Richard’s business before he retired, just that it was real estate-related. What I do know is that they were incredibly sweet, and so devoted to each other. They were always buying little gifts for one another, not necessarily expensive stuff. More like cute tchotchkes. And they would go on short weekend jaunts to nearby romantic getaways like Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, or just off the coast to Catalina Island. They were clearly deeply in love and being around them gave me hope that I might find that again too someday.”

“Is there anything else we should know?” Jessie asked.

The woman paused for several seconds before answering.

“I don’t know if this appropriate to ask now,” Townsend said, her voice getting quiet as her cheeks flushed, “but do you know what will happen to Laurel and Hardy? Because if there’s no long-term plan for their care, I’d be willing—honored—to take them. I feel like it’s the least I could do.”

“We can look into that,” Susannah said briskly. “In the meantime, we have one more question for you.”

Jessie, who was mildly touched by Townsend’s gesture, could already tell from the detective’s tone what her question would be, and was impressed with her partner’s unwillingness to let herself be affected by sentiment.

“Yes?” Townsend said.

“Where were you last night?”

“I already told the officers where,” she said.

That was true, but Jessie knew that just like her, Detective Susannah Valentine wanted to look at Townsend’s face when they heard her alibi.

“Humor us,” Susannah said.

“I was at the Whisky a Go Go nightclub on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood to see this old 1980s band I like called L.A. Guns,” she said. “I went with two girlfriends. We spent the night at the London West Hollywood Hotel across the street so we wouldn’t have to drive back so late. I got up at 6:30 this morning to be able to get to Richard and Cynthia’s for the 7 a.m. walk.”

Jessie knew well that Jamil already had verifying her GPS location on his to-do list. They would also question her friends. And Jessie was a little curious about how Townsend’s husband had died as well. But if all that checked out, then Olivia Townsend would be off their suspect list.

Of course, that was small comfort. If they eliminated her, that meant one suspect down, and potentially hundreds still to investigate. It was going to be a challenging day.